Thursday, May 31, 2012

Story #1 tells
of how the Obama Administration continues to put Obama in history with other
past presidents.Of course he did that
himself when he placed himself as just under Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ.#2 asks the question how smart is Mr.
Obama.#3 is a new video for Romney (a
very good one).#4 says the way for
Romney to sew this up is to point out, Republicans can govern, while everywhere
Democrats are in power the government is a mess.#5 looks to Wisconsin and wonders what effect
it will have on the National election.#6 has Elizabeth Warren owning up to registering herself as a minority
professor at both Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania contrary to what
she had earlier claimed.#7 looks at the
contempt that the left has for not just their rivals on the right, but for the
little people below them.#8 reveals the
horse trading Obama did with the Big Pharma regarding Obamacare.#9 looks at media bias.

Today’s Thoughts

A recent survey by CBO shows that the jobs created by the
stimulus may have cost $4.1 million per job.This means the stimulus may have created just
200,000 jobs.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is proposing banning soft drinks that are more than 16
ounces.Welcome to liberal land aka
the nanny state.

Economic
news:Jobless claims rose for the fourth
straight week last week while the economy’s
expansion was revised down from 2.2 percent to 1.9 percent for the first
quarter.

Quote
of the day:"The
man who promised everything is delivering nothing….Journalists who wept when he won the election
now grind their teeth in despair. ... The
gap between sizzle and steak never seemed so large."Noemie Emery

1. Obama’s Self Evaluation

Presidents are identified in the
history books by their accomplishments, if they have any.

Abraham Lincoln is remembered for
saving the union and ending slavery. Franklin D. Roosevelt crafted the New Deal
in the Great Depression and led the nation in World War II.

Barack Obama is still writing the last chapters of his
presidency, though there's a growing list of reasons why it may well be known
in the end as the "Me Presidency" that is all about him.

Someone recently dug up a number of examples where the White
House staff has been inserting Obama into the biographies of past presidents as part of the White House historical narrative. Among
them:

While Calvin Coolidge was the first chief executive to give
a public radio address, Obama is the first to be on LinkedIn.Really.

FDR presided over the enactment of Social Security, but
Obama is presiding over its preservation.
How about its deepening insolvency?

This is a president who has an
exalted view of himself and he frequently reminds Americans of how truly great
he sees himself. He's fond of the pronoun "I" when describing his
exploits and isn't shy about comparing himself to our greatest presidents.

He told CBS's "60 Minutes", "I would put our
legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against
any president -- with the possible exceptions of [Lyndon] Johnson, FDR, and
Lincoln -- just in terms of what we've gotten
done in modern history."

The article goes on to show how Obama
compares himself to Ronald Reagan.He
seems to keep missing the obvious analogy….Jimmy Carter.

2. How Smart is Barack Obama?

…Could
it be that Mr. Obama's "superior intellect" is a myth created by
journalists to mask what may be the thinnest resume of anyone ever elected
president? An
example of puffery is the description of Mr. Obama as a former "professor
of constitutional law." Mr. Obama
was a part time instructor at the University of Chicago law school, without the
title or status of professor. And, according to blogger Doug Ross, he
wasn't very popular with the real professors.

"I spent some time with the
highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back," Mr. Ross
wrote in March 2010. "According to
my professor friend, [Obama] had the lowest intellectual capacity in the
building. ... The other professors hated him because he was lazy,
unqualified,"

Mr. Obama's been governing like
someone with a resume too thin for a president. He's "incompetent,"
an "amateur," former President Bill Clinton told Hillary Clinton at a
private gathering with friends, according to a new book by Ed Klein. The
Clintons have vehemently denied his account.

Even Ms. Daum noticed "the gulf
between the brilliant young man who wanted to change the world and the stymied
president who can barely pass a piece of legislation." Mr. Obama is just
too smart to be a good president, she wrote.

Or not smart enough. "The presidency of Barack Obama is a
case study in stupid does," said Bret Stephens of the Wall Street
Journal.

I once had a man who worked for me.He was very likeable and smooth, but as a
supervisor he just didn’t have the intellect for it.Over time we began to use his name as a verb
which meant you screwed something up.It
would be like saying, “You really Obamaed that one.”

Look to see Romney’s favorables go up with women and
contrast this ad with Obama’s.

4. Republicans Can Govern

How Republicans clean
Democrat clocks all over the country? All it will take is a simple
message: Republicans can govern.
Democrats can't.

Think of all the
contrasts available between adroit Republican governors and flailing Democratic
ones. For one, the surreal
spectacle of Wisconsin Democrats focusing resources on their third election
campaign since the 2010 election to defeat Scott Walker's collective
bargaining reform, even when that reform is no longer a real issue, shows that Democrats are in election mode every moment
of every year.

This difference has
shown up elsewhere in state and local government. Rudy Giuliani may not
have been a conservative, but as Mayor of New York, he was a courageous and
effective leader, which gained him admiration from conservatives. The contrast between Giuliani and Dinkins, the
hapless Democrat cipher who preceded him, is stark.

New Jersey Governor
Chris Christie is also not conservative, but he is an honest and courageous
executive in the spirit of Giuliani. The contrast between Christie and
Jon Corzine, his Democrat predecessor who has managed to mislay one billion
dollars of investors’ money,is
stunning.

In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina blasted the states around
the Gulf of Mexico, Democrat Governor Blanco of Louisiana engaged in crass
political maneuvering against her rival Democrat Mayor Negin of New Orleans.Republican Governor Barbour, meanwhile, in
neighboring Mississippi, acted decisively and effectively to protect his fellow
Mississippians.

Two years ago, when the
BP oil spill was threatening the livelihood and safety of Americans, Obama was that nervous skinny man who
spouted meaningless rhetoric, while Republican Governor Jindal was the
effective executive who inspired Louisianans with his quick actions to minimize
the damage…

And
if you look at the states, it generally are very liberal states that are in
terrible shape of their own making.

5. Wisconsin the end
game

Tuesday’s Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election is
much more than a local contest between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his
challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett; it’s the climax of a prolonged
guerrilla war against Walker’s vital reforms….

…The Democrats finally have their wish: the chance to unseat a sitting
governor — not for any malfeasance, but for implementing his campaign promises.
They’re likely to regret it.

Despite the left’s
apocalyptic warnings, Walker’s reforms have helped turn the state’s ruinous
finances around. His rollback of union
“rights” — which started the whole mess — isn’t even being discussed anymore.
Job creation is up and public education’s finances have been dramatically
reformed and stabilized.

Polls show Walker
heading into the do-over (he beat Barrett in 2010) with a lead of up to eight
points. Sensing defeat, national
Democrats have withdrawn support for the recall, infuriating local party
functionaries.

But the unions at least
want some scalps, if only to discourage those looking to support Walker-style
reforms elsewhere. They don’t much care whom they take down: Four more state
senators face recall next Tuesday, as does Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch —
collateral damage in the ongoing Battle of Wisconsin.

Obama-tested slogans such as the bogus “war on women” and
the hate-the-rich meme have popped up on yard signs across Wisconsin, but the
local party’s sagging fortunes mirror the president’s. A big Walker win will send an
unmistakable message to Washington: Stop spending, and start reforming….

This will be minimized by the national Democrats and hyped by the
Republicans.Does it make a
difference?Probably in Wisconsin as it
shows it is now up for grabs and should be entered as a swing state.

6. Elizabeth
Warren:I told Harvard I was Native
American

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren acknowledged
for the first time late Wednesday night that she told Harvard University and
the University of Pennsylvania that she was Native American, but she continued
to insist that race played no role in her recruitment.

“At some point after I was hired by
them, I . . . provided that information to the University of Pennsylvania and
Harvard,’’ she said in a statement issued by her campaign. “My Native American heritage is part of who I am, I’m proud of it and I
have been open about it.’’

Warren’s statement is her first
acknowledgment that she identified herself as Native American to the Ivy League
schools. While she has said she identified herself as a minority in a legal
directory, she has carefully avoided any suggestion during the last month that
she took further actions to promote her purported heritage.

When the issue first surfaced last month, Warren said she
only learned Harvard was claiming her as a minority when she read it in the
Boston Herald….

It appears that Elizabeth Warren speaks with “forked tongue.”
Perhaps she and Ward Churchill were separated at birth.

7. Double Standards and
Contempt

Yes, liberals are immoral. The liberal power elite are selfish, hypocritical,
arrogant, self-righteous, and, worst of all, destructive of those around them. They are willing to saddle everyone else with rules and regulations that do not apply to
them, and with higher taxes that they somehow escape paying. The Buffett
Rule might sound like a great idea, but it would never apply to the Buffetts of
this world. Or the Kerrys, Kennedys, or any other left-wing billionaire.

Liberal do-gooders are
always coming up with lovely schemes for redistributing other people's money
and managing other people's lives. The
problem is that all of these schemes do more harm than good. Welfare,
which redistributes wealth to those who cannot work but also to those who avoid
working or underreport income, is funded on the backs of those who actually do
work. "Saving the planet" costs jobs but never actually saves
anything. Killing fossil fuels
increases energy costs and triggers inflation across the board.Yet the liberal elite blithely support
every cause that comes along with no consideration of the cost to ordinary
people. In doing so, they pad their already inflated sense of
self-importance, and at no cost to themselves.

Scratch the surface of the liberal elite, and you will find
a monstrous contempt for those "beneath" them. Liberals like Barack
Obama live and breathe in a realm of utter disdain for ordinary Americans,
including congressmen who hail from what the president likes to call
"Palookaville." It is not just that they are out of touch; it
is that they despise what is normal and decent. They would no more live
in the heartland or send their kids to a public school than they would forego
an exemption engineered solely to save them money -- the same tax break for the
rich that they publicly decry as soooo unfair. It's no surprise
that several prominent liberal Democrats made their fortunes as slum lords and
ambulance-chasers. Others just married their money….

A
bit over the top, but not much.There
definitely is a record of creating solutions that make the problem worse and
regulating things that end up hurting normal Americans.Certainly the war on fossil fuels exemplifies
this.It’s designed to possible solve a
problem that doesn’t really exist, but it gives them more power than Caesars in
Ancient Rome had.

8. Obama
traded political actions for public support

Drugmakers led by Pfizer Inc. agreed to run a “very significant public
campaign” bankrolling political support for the 2010 health-care law, including
TV ads, while the Obama administration
promised to block provisions opposed by drugmakers, documents released by
Republicans show.

The internal memos and e-mails for the first time unveil the industry's plan
to finance positive TV ads and supportive groups, along with providing $80
billion in discounts and taxes that were included in the law. The administration has previously denied
the existence of a deal involving political support.

The documents were released today by Republicans on the House Energy and
Commerce Committee. They identify price
controls under Medicare and drug importation as the key industry concerns,
and show that former Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Kindler and his top
aides were involved in drawing it up and getting support from other company
executives.

“As part of our agreement, PhRMA needs to undertake a very significant
public campaign in order to support policies of mutual interest to the industry
and the Administration,” according to a July 14, 2009, memo from the PhRMA. “We have included a significant amount for
advertising to express appreciation for lawmakers’ positions on health care
reform issues.”…

Didn’t a former governor of Illinois
go to jail for doing something very similar?

9. Bias in the Media

On the front page of its Sunday edition, the New York Times gave a big spread to Ann Romney
spending lots of time and tons of money on an exotic genre of horse-riding. The
clear implication: The Romneys are silly
rich, move in rarefied and exotic circles, and are perhaps a tad shady.Only days earlier, news surfaced that author David Maraniss had unearthed new details about Barack Obama’s prolific,
college-age dope-smoking for his new book, “Barack Obama: The Story” — and the Times made it a brief on A15.No wonder
Republicans are livid with the early coverage of the 2012 general election
campaign. To them, reporters are scaring
up stories to undermine the introduction of Mitt Romney to the general election
audience – and once again downplaying ones that could hurt the president.

“The New York Times has given Obama the longest wet kiss in political
history, and they have done him a favor again,” former Mississippi Gov.
Haley Barbour said. “The New York Times does a huge expose that Ann Romney
rides horses. Well, so does my wife, and a few million other people. Watch out
for equine performers!”

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Story #1 looks
to conventional energy to pull America out of the current economic malaise. #2 tells of the Consumer confidence index
dropping for the third straight month.
It does not bode well of Obama.
#3 tells why one conservative thinks Obama will lose. #4 relates that the man who seconded
President Obama in 2008 is leaving the Democratic Party and going
Republican. #5 shows how the Democratic
strategy analysts are kidding themselves as more and more of their assumptions
prove false. #6 perhaps give some hope
to the Democrats. It seems Obama is a
scrapper and willing to claw and fight til the end. I highly recommend you read #7. It tells the truth that if the Republicans “compromise”
with the Democrats, they become part of the problem which is why the Democrats
keep calling for them to compromise.

Today’s Thoughts

Obama and the Democrats seem intent on following California over the cliff rather
than any of the states that are actually recovering. You would think they would be smarter than
that.

It appears the smartest man in the world
(well at least the smartest President ever) has upset Poland by referring to Polish Death Camps when they were
actually German Death Camps in occupied Poland. I guess history along with economics isn’t BHO’s
strong suit.

Obamacare
is partial paid for by stealing money from Medicare. How does that work? The Medicare
trustees must assume that physician reimbursements under Medicaid will drop
to 55% of private health insurance by 2086, while physicians serving Medicare patients "would eventually fall to 26%
of private health insurance levels."
It isn’t going to happen and Obamacare isn’t going to do any of the
things Obama promised it would.

Although
the number is small, the percentage of
Americans turning in their passports has increased by 338% since Barack Obama
has become President.

1. The Path to
Prosperity and the Presidency

Energy, the lifeblood
of the economy, is the Achilles heel of President Barack Obama. Mitt Romney can win the November election
if he concentrates his campaign on a sensible energy policy.
Mr. Romney will have to
make a case not merely against Mr. Obama's failings but also for why he has the
better plan to restore prosperity. (WSJ 4-26-12)

... optimistic conservative
vision that can inspire the party faithful, appeal to swing voters and set out
a governing agenda should he win in November...

As a presumed candidate
for the U.S. presidency, Romney should
spell out now a coherent policy of low-cost and secure energy that would boost
the U.S. economy, ensure jobs and prosperity, and raise people up from poverty.
Fundamentally, he and his surrogates must educate and inspire the public.

He should pledge specific goals: lower gasoline prices,
cheaper household electricity, cheaper fertilizer for farmers and lower food
prices for everybody, cheaper transport fuels for aviation and for the trucking
industry, lower raw material costs for the chemical industry. He should also indicate
the kind of people who would be part of his team, who would fill the crucial
posts and carry out these policies. His running mate should have a record
of endorsing these goals….

This
is the magic bullet for the economy and one that Obama can’t take because he is
religiously against fossil fuels at least any that are drilled in America. America is sitting on great wealth just
waiting for us to be sensible and use it.

It’s unexpected because the MSM really wants Obamanomics to
work. It is the triumph of hope over
experience.

3. Obama will lose in November

It is time to call the 2012 election. President Obama
cannot win.He will likely lose big, in a very
lopsided election. Pundits will claim to be surprised when the
outcome becomes apparent. They should not be, as the signs of such a result are everywhere, despite the mainstream
media's attempts to suppress them.

There are numerous
reasons why Obama will lose. Incompetence, likeability, and duplicity are
a few. Obama has alienated too many in the electorate, including large
numbers who supported him the first time. In 2012, many will vote against
him or (even better) just stay home….

….Why Obama Will Lose the Election

Why Obama will lose
this next election is less difficult to understand than how he won the first
time. Barack Obama was a fluke, an
unlikely candidate with no demonstrated experience in anything other than
reading a teleprompter and sounding good.

He was pushed to his
party's nomination as a result of the media. His election was a quirk,
rather than something earned. Any Democrat who gained the nomination was
likely ensured the presidency. Bush fatigue and the hapless John McCain
made that almost certain.

Obama will lose the next election because his greatest
asset, his unknownness, exists no longer. Voter imagination can no longer be manipulated in the
presence of facts. Quite simply, Obama will not be re-elected because too
many people now know him. His biggest attribute has been taken away.

What people got was nothing like what they were promised or
imagined.
What was a blank slate upon which to imagine an Obama presidency now is a
full-blown portrait filled with failure, warts, and scars.
Obama's track record is
abysmal. Floyd and Mary Beth Brown discussed four of Obama's failures:

Obama's 825 billion dollar stimulus
failed to
keep unemployment below 8 percent as promised. Since President Obama's stimulus passed, America has lost 1.1
million jobs. If you count people who have become discouraged and are
no longer seeking jobs, some economists believe that real unemployment
rate is above twenty percent.

Obama
called his health care package one of his major accomplishments. He told
CBS' Steve Kroft he was "putting in place a system in which we're
going to start lowering health care costs." Yet it has failed to make health
insurance more affordable. According to the fact
watchdog website FactCheck.org, ObamaCare is actually making health care
"less affordable." Workers paid an average of $132 more for
family coverage just this year.

Obama
predicted his investments in green energy would create 5 million jobs, but
the Wall Street Journal reports: "The green jobs subsidy story gets
more embarrassing by the day. Three
years ago President Obama promised that by the end of the decade, America
would have five million green jobs, but so far, some $90 billion in
government spending has delivered very few."

Obama pledged to cut the deficit in
half,
saying: "And that's why today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we
inherited by half by the end of my first term in office." Even if
every part of Obama's deficit reduction proposal was enacted, the deficit
at the end of his first term would still be $1.33 trillion, more than
twice what he promised….

This is an excellent article with a lot more specifics
telling you why Obama will lose big. The
one thing the author didn’t mention that I feel with also hurt Obama is his
going so negative so soon. That will
hurt the last thing he had going for him, people like him. After six months of bashing Romney, blaming
Bush, and telling transparent lies, he will lose that as well.

4. Democrat who seconded Obama’s
nomination in 2008 Switches Parties

The former Alabama congressman (Artur
Davis), an early Barack Obama endorser who lost a bid for governor last year, announces
online that he's leaving the Democratic Party and changing his registration
to a different state:

If I were to
run, it would be as a Republican. And I am in the process of changing my
voter registration from Alabama to Virginia, a development which likely does
represent a closing of one chapter and perhaps the opening of another.

As to the horse-race question that animated parts
of the blogosphere, it is true that people whose judgment I value have asked me
to weigh the prospect of running in one of the Northern Virginia congressional
districts in 2014 or 2016, or alternatively, for a seat in the Virginia
legislature in 2015. If that sounds imprecise, it’s a function of how uncertain
political opportunities can be—and if that sounds expedient, never lose sight of the fact that politics
is not wishfulness, it’s the execution of a long, draining process to win votes
and help and relationships while your adversaries are working just as hard to
tear down the ground you build. …

On the specifics, I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and
job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again. I
have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc
appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured: frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has
not given us the substance of a united country. You have also seen me write
that faith institutions should not be compelled to violate their teachings
because faith is a freedom, too. You’ve read that in my view, the law can’t
continue to favor one race over another in offering hard-earned slots in
colleges: America has changed, and we
are now diverse enough that we don’t need to accommodate a racial spoils
system. And you know from these pages that I still think the way we have
gone about mending the flaws in our healthcare system is the wrong way—it goes
further than we need and costs more than we can bear.

Alex Isenstadt has more here. Davis's move is not surprising, given the
trajectory of his activities and public comments over the last year, but it is
still remarkable for a politician who gave a seconding speech to nominate
Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention.

Watch for the signs, omens, things
that tell you which way the political winds are blowing and you will see it is
an ill wind if you are a democrat.

5. Are Obama Aides Fooling Themselves?

“Axelrod
is endeavoring not to panic.” So reads a sentence in John Heilemann’s exhaustive
article on Barack Obama's campaign in this week's New
York magazine….

…Heilemann's article is well-sourced. It's based on
interviews with David Axelrod, the former White House aide now back in Chicago,
David Plouffe, the 2008 manager now in the White House, and Jim Messina, the
current campaign manager.

The picture
Heilemann draws is of campaign managers whose assumptions have been proved
wrong and who seem to be fooling themselves about what will work in the
campaign.One assumption that has been proved wrong is that the Obama campaign would raise $1 billion and
that, as in 2008, far more money would be spent for Democrats than Republicans.

Heilemann reports the campaign managers' alibis. Obama
has given donors "shabby treatment," he writes. This of a president who has attended more fundraisers than his four
predecessors combined.As for the Obama-authorized
super-PAC being $90 million short of its $100 million goal, well, it was
late getting started and some money givers don't like negative ads.

A more plausible explanation is that big Democratic
donors don't trust the political judgment of super-PAC head Bill Burton -- who
was passed over for promotion to White House press secretary -- the way big
Republican donors trust Karl Rove.

Here's another: A
lot of people like the way Obama has governed less than they liked the idea of
Obama governing.

A second assumption is that the Obama managers
"see Romney as a walking, talking bull's-eye" and have "contempt
for his skills as a political performer."

You can find some basis for this in Romney's
performance in the primaries. But you can also find evidence to the contrary.
In my own experience as a political consultant, I found it dangerous to assume
your opponents will screw up. Sometimes they don't.

As for fooling themselves, I have to wonder whether the
Obama people were spoofing Heilemann at points. He quotes Plouffe as saying. "Let's be clear what [Romney] would do
as president," and then summarizes: "Potentially abortion will be
criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He's far right on
immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay
marriage."

These claims don't seem sustainable to me. No one seriously thinks there's any
likelihood of criminalizing abortion or banning contraception. Romney
brushed off that last one in a debate.Nor is there any
chance an anti-same-sex marriage amendment would get the two-thirds it needs in
Congress to go to the states. Opposing legalization of illegal immigrants
is not a clear vote-loser particularly now
that, the Pew Hispanic Center reports, a million have left the country….

There is a lot of information out
there that is very discouraging if you are an Obama supporter. The MSM tries to cover it up or minimize its
importance, but it’s there and it spells doom for Obama and the Democrats in
November.

6. Desperately seeking votes

…John Heilemann, co-author of a definitive work on the 2008 election called Game
Change, writes in a new piece in New York magazine
that for “anyone still starry-eyed about
Obama” the 2012 campaign will disabuse them of that notion:

The months ahead will provide a bracing revelation
about what he truly is: not a savior, not a saint, not a man above the fray, but a brass-knuckled, pipe-hitting,
red-in-tooth-and-claw brawler determined to do what is necessary to stay in
power — in other words, a politician.

If the mainstream-media journalists who spent so little time in 2008 looking
into the Daley machine that Barack Obama sprang from want to do more due
diligence this time, they could start
with a closer look at Eric Whitaker and the rest of Obama’s inner circle.
It’s probably a much richer mine of stories than any investigation of Mitt Romney’s
Bain Capital days or Ann Romney’s obsession with expensive horses is likely to
provide.

Tooth and nail is the way the group
will fight, but they are kidding themselves.

7. The Truth about Spending

….But all of these numbers are a sideshow: Republicans in
Washington helped create the problem, and Romney should concede the point.

Focused on fighting a war, Bush --
never a tightwad to begin with -- handed the keys to the Treasury to Tom DeLay
and Denny Hastert, and they spent enough money to burn a wet mule. On Bush's watch, education spending more
than doubled, the government enacted the biggest expansion in entitlements
since the Great Society (Medicare Part D), and we created a vast new government
agency (the Department of Homeland Security).

And yet, to listen to Obama and his allies, the Bush years were a time of
"market fundamentalism" and government inaction. That's in part
because when it comes to domestic policy, Democrats will always want to spend
more than Republicans, so Republicans are always branded as mean-spiritedly
frugal by comparison.

Nearly every problem with spending and debt associated with
the Bush years was made far worse under Obama. The man campaigned as an outsider who was going to change
course before we went over a fiscal cliff. Instead, when he got behind the
wheel, as it were, he hit the gas instead of the brakes -- and yet has the
temerity to claim that all of the forward momentum is Bush's fault.

Worse, the current obsession with "compromise" in Washington boils
down to the argument that Republicans should revert back to being part of the
problem, enabling Obama to "invest" even more money in his pet
schemes.

Romney is under no obligation to
defend the Republican performance during the Bush years. Indeed, if he's serious about fixing what's wrong with Washington, he
has an obligation not to defend it. This is an argument that the Tea Party
-- which famously dealt Obama's party a shellacking in 2010 -- and independents
alike are entirely open to. Voters don't want a president to rein in runaway
Democratic spending; they want one to rein in runaway Washington spending.

Let Obama play the partisan blame
game. He's the partisan insider this time. The role of bipartisan outsider is
Romney's for the taking.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Story #1
looks at what a second Obama term would be like.#2 looks at taxmageddon and what happens
early next year.#3 lays out Obama’s
campaign strategy for 2012.#4 looks at
the Democrats and meaningful work.Isn’t
all work meaningful?#5 Van Jones sees the Tea Party was wanting to destroy America.

Today’s Thought

Mitt
Romney has clinched the nomination
for the Republican Party.

It appears using ultra sounds to identify girls to be aborted has come to the
USA.I guess there is a war on women.

1. If you think Obama’s first term was bad…

Before being elected in 2008, Barack
Obama said: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the
United States of America." That belief has turned out to be wholly
accurate. America has been greatly
transformed by all areas of this administration's policy goals and actions.

The most significant policy change
during President Obama's first term was his health-care "reform," the
movement of 17% of our economy from the marketplace of ideas and
physician-patient decision-making to control and management by the federal
government. The Supreme Court is now considering ObamaCare are constitutional,
and is expected to decide by the end of June.

ObamaCare is a huge governmental mandate, the impact of
which we are just beginning to feel.
If the Supreme Court upholds the law, full government control of health care
will start next year, with the new
ObamaCare taxes on investment income. The
individual mandates and other rules and regulations will begin in 2014. If
the court upholds ObamaCare and Mr. Obama is re-elected in November, the scope
and size of our government's control over health care will increase dramatically.

A second Obama term would guarantee
no repeal or significant repair of ObamaCare for at least four more years,
allowing it to push its tentacles into every aspect of our health care. It will
give the health and human services
secretary free rein in her decisions about new mandates and about which
organizations or entities can be granted exemptions from them. This would give
her and the president a new way to reward favored special interests.

The second negative policy impact of
the president's first term is the large and unsustainable increase in federal
spending and debt. Annual spending increased from $3 trillion in 2008 to $3.5
trillion in 2010, and the Obama plan is to grow it to $5.5 trillion a year less
than a decade from now. Deficits averaging $1.3 trillion a year have been the
rule so far, and that thinking—and perhaps worse—would be with us for a second
Obama term.

Mr. Obama's first term commenced with an $800 billion
"stimulus" giveaway to the favored constituencies of the liberal left. Then the excessive spending that created the deficits
continued. The president's recent budgets have been so far from the mainstream
that Congress, including Democrats, has had little interest in supporting them.
If Mr. Obama is re-elected and no longer constrained in his policy proposals by
the need to keep independents in his camp, there will be continued squandering
of the nation's fiscal resources. All of this will lead to even more burdens on
individuals, families and businesses, not to mention future generations….

Everything is there for a huge defeat for Obama and the
Democrats, but we can’t be complacent because the cost is too dear.

2. Obama brings on 'Taxmageddon'

'Taxmageddon' isn't only about the
half-trillion-dollar blow to the economy that arrives in 2013 on the end of the
Bush-Obama tax rates. Several of the
Affordable Care Act's worst tax increases kick in too, such as the new excise
tax on medical devices.

The
2.3% levy applies to the sale of everything from cardiac defibrillators to
artificial joints to MRI scanners. The device tax is supposed to raise $28.5
billion from 2013 to 2022, and it is
especially harmful because it applies to gross sales, not profits. Companies at
make-or-break margins could be taxed out of existence, especially in an
intensely competitive industry where four of five businesses are start-ups or
midsized.

As
even the liberal papoose Elizabeth Warren recently put it, the device tax
"disproportionately impacts the small companies with the narrowest
financial margins and the broadest innovative potential."…

Obama promised he would fundamentally change America and
this is just one of the ways he will do

it.

3. What Negative will look like this year

…The president begs to
differ. In 2008, the junior senator from Illinois won in a landslide by fashioning a potent “coalition of the
ascendant,” as Teixeira and Halpin call it, in which the components were minorities (especially
Latinos), socially liberal college-educated whites (especially women), and
young voters. This time around, Obama
will seek to do the same thing again, only more so. The growth of those
segments of the electorate and the president’s strength with them have his team brimming with confidence that ­demographics
will trump economics in November—and in the process create a template for
Democratic dominance at the presidential level for years to come.

But if the Obama 2012 strategy in
this regard is all about the amplification of 2008, in terms of message it will
represent a striking deviation. Though
the Obamans certainly hit John McCain hard four years ago—running more negative
ads than any campaign in history—what they intend to do to Romney is more
savage. They will pummel him for being a vulture-vampire capitalist at Bain
Capital. They will pound him for being a miserable failure as the governor of
Massachusetts. They will mash him for being a water-carrier for Paul Ryan’s
Social Darwinist fiscal program. They will maul him for being a combination of
Jerry Falwell, Joe Arpaio, and John Galt on a range of issues that strike deep
chords with the Obama coalition. “We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president,’ ” Plouffe explains.
“Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive
services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the
Constitution to ban gay marriage.”

The Obama effort at disqualifying
Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of
revanchism. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,”
says a top Obama strategist. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young,
or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This fucking guy is
gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been
part of that.’ ”…

Makes you understand why he chose “Forward” as his campaign
slogan.And this strategy might work
except for one thing.Reality.This isn’t 2008 and a negative campaign like
this is going to turn voters off and he will lose ground, not gain it.

4. Meaningful work and other Educational Deadends

“Education” is a word that covers a
lot of very different things, from vital, life-saving medical skills to
frivolous courses to absolutely counterproductive courses that fill people with
a sense of grievance and entitlement, without giving them either the skills to
earn a living or a realistic understanding of the world required for a citizen
in a free society.

The lack of realism among many highly educated people has
been demonstrated in many ways.

When I saw signs in Yellowstone
National Park warning visitors not to get too close to a buffalo, I realized
that this was a warning that no illiterate farmer of a bygone century would
have needed. No one would have had to tell him not to mess with a huge animal
that literally weighs a ton, and can charge at you at 30 miles an hour.

No one would have had to tell that
illiterate farmer’s daughter not to stand by the side of a highway, trying to
hitch a ride with strangers, as too many college girls have done, sometimes
with results that ranged all the way up to their death.

The dangers that a lack of realism can bring to many
educated people are completely overshadowed by the dangers to a whole society
created by the unrealistic views of the world promoted in many educational
institutions.

It was painful, for example, to see an internationally
renowned scholar say that what low-income young people needed was “meaningful
work.” But this is a notion common among
educated elites, regardless of how counterproductive its consequences may be
for society at large, and for low-income youngsters especially.

What young people need is work.There is meaning in all work not the least
being independence and a sense of accomplishment.

5. Van Jones says TEA Party wants to destroy America

President Obama's former green czar, Van Jones, described the Tea Party as a group of "so-called patriots"
who are trying to destroy America last weekend at a campaign on behalf of
the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the Wisconsin recall election.

"At this point in this struggle, it's the so-called patriots who are
the ones who are smashing down every American institution," Jones said last
weekend in Milwaukee. "It's the so-called patriots, the ones who come out
here with their Tea Party and the flags and call themselves patriots -- they're
the ones that are smashing down our unions, smashing down public education,
smashing down every American institution that we built, and our parents built,
and our grandparents built to make this country great."

Jones added that the Tea Party is
trying to "take a wrecking ball -- and paint it red, white, and blue --
and smash down all the things our parents did for us."…